“Antidotes?” One of Alesh’s eyebrows rose up near her hairline.
“Or… reversals,” Tatsu amended. “Someone in the market has to know a way to undo the damage the poisons did, but we don’t think they’ll be particularly forthcoming with the information.”
Ral stood up then and crossed the space between the hammocks to put both her hands on the sides of Yudai’s face. It was probably surprise more than anything that kept him from pushing her away. He looked up at her with hooded eyes as she ran her fingertips across his forehead.
“Oh,” she said, and the word was heavy. “Yudai, bad. Lots of pain?”
“No.” Yudai sounded confused. “It never really hurts.”
“No,” Ral said. One hand fell down to his chest and pressed against his ribs, on the right side above his heart. “Pain here.”
Yudai sat back, breaking the connection between them. Tatsu thought maybe he’d reply, but nothing came out of his thinly pressed mouth. Yudai sat back against the taut ropes and crossed his arms over his chest as Ral returned to Alesh’s side.
“So we need to find something to fix it,” Alesh said.
“That’s really all we can do,” Tatsu agreed.
Alesh’s eyes darted between Jotin and Tatsu, and then she nodded. “Well, since finding you seemed to be the reason that Ral wanted to come out here, I suppose we’d better help you.”
“We should go,” Jotin said as he pushed off from the wall. “I do not know how fruitful this endeavor will be.”
Watching both Ral and Alesh stand to ready themselves, the buzzing beneath Tatsu’s skin settled. The women were pieces of Chayd that he felt much more comfortable having with him—bits of home that made the unfamiliar buildings of Moswar less threatening. But as the group moved to leave, Yudai grabbed at Tatsu’s good arm and tugged him backwards.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Yudai asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be? What’s wrong with having them here? You know Ral, you know how she seems to just know things—”
“I’m not worried about Ral,” Yudai cut him off. “I just don’t trust her sister.”
Tatsu watched the other three make their way towards the arched entryway that led back out to the streets. “There’s nothing to worry about. She came here to take care of Ral.”
“She was more than willing to sell me out to the queen once in order to get her freedom,” Yudai said. “What makes you think that anything has changed?”
“She didn’t come here for the queen.”
“But how do you know that?” Yudai asked. “You just want to believe it was a coincidence.”
The stars were beginning to come out overhead, and to his right, Tatsu could see the sliver of the moon rising up over the flat tops of the Moswar buildings, stacked like blocks against the horizon line.
“Look, Alesh is my friend,” Tatsu started.
“I thought I was your friend. Or at least something like that.”
Tatsu groaned. “Why are we doing this? I trust her.”
“And what happens if you’re wrong?” Yudai insisted, and his fingers tightened around Tatsu’s arm. “What happens if she’s here to take me back to Chayd because the queen has made another of those deals with her? What happens if she’s only here for her own interests?”
“Then I’ll figure out how to get us out of here. I’m not just going to give you back to the queen of Chayd, you know that.”
Yudai held his gaze for a long time, until the space between them became too uncomfortable to keep staring through. Then he dropped both his hand and his eyes, sighing loudly.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go, then.”
But as Yudai started up after the others, waiting just outside the archway for them, Tatsu had a hard time swallowing back the knot that had reformed in his throat.
“This is the Raydrau,” Jotin said as they stepped into a large open square very near to what Tatsu thought was the center of Moswar. Despite the darkness, the night market was alive with energy and activity. The awnings stretched over the carts had lanterns of colored glass hanging from them. The mottled glow of the baubles overlapped and blended together across the ground, a painting of light that extended well past the edge of the carts. There were no buildings in the square, only the awnings and tent stalls hitched up with small iron hooks that stuck out of the ground. There were more people in the night market than Tatsu had ever seen in one place, and all of them seemed to have an agenda: buying, selling, or weaving through the others gathered in clusters around the cart latches in a strange sort of dance.
The smell was not as pronounced as Tatsu remembered it being, though he could still pick out the faint scent of burning incense. There were only a few stalls selling food, and most of it looked as if it were meant to be eaten on the go. There were strips of smoked meat on spindly sticks and small bags of dried fruits sitting on the side of several carts close to the entrance. The majority of the windows and tents were selling other goods, and as Tatsu leaned closer to the nearest one, he could see dozens of woven animal figures inlaid with colorful stones.
“Perhaps we should split up,” Jotin said. “Your friend here—”
“Alesh,” Tatsu supplied.
“If she knows the poisons used, she may be able to pinpoint some of them, provided she can get past the initial negotiation.”
Alesh looked slightly disgruntled. “What is the ‘initial negotiation’?”
“The alchemists will not immediately show you black market goods,” Jotin said. “You must converse with them enough for them to trust you. If they believe you are threatening to turn them in, you will get nowhere.”
“So we argue?” Alesh asked.
“Only argue if you wish for them to test some of their more inventive wares on you,” Jotin warned.
Alesh’s gaze, when it met Tatsu’s, seemed both annoyed and apprehensive. “So I’m supposed to weasel into the good graces of Joesarian alchemists to find a possible antidote for the toxins without making them mad?”
“See what you can do, at least,” Tatsu said.
“Fine.” Alesh looped her arm through Ral’s. “I’ll take Ral with me. You three are on your own.”
As the two women walked into the throng of people, they slowly disappeared from view, until the mass of market goers shifted into place around them.
Jotin turned to him, expression severe. “Let me handle the negotiations and try not to make anyone mad.”
He turned and moved towards one of the stalls on the outer border of the cluster of tents and carts. On Tatsu’s right, Yudai made a sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.
“It seems like all we really do is make people mad,” he said, and Tatsu never got the chance to agree before they had to hurry to catch up with Jotin’s retreating figure.
Six
The first stand Jotin made his way to was operated by an old Joesarian woman with deep-set wrinkles across her feathered face, dressed in layers of light, fluttery fabric. Strewn across the wooden table in front of her were a wide assortment of bottles, the glass containers a multitude of colors and bulb-like shapes. There were a few others milling around the wares, occasionally picking up a bottle to peer at the cloudy liquid inside, and after a few minutes, Jotin made his way to the front of the crowd.
The conversation that started between the seller and Jotin was in one of the Joesarian dialects, so Tatsu hung back with nothing to contribute. He couldn’t tell what the two were saying, though everything seemed civil enough, and if he had to guess, he’d say that Jotin was inquiring about a few of the bottles sitting out on the table. Every so often, the woman would pick one up and point at it, explaining the contents, and Jotin would nod, moving on to the next one. Anything beyond that, and Tatsu was lost. He waited while trying to ignore the rising hairs on his arms and watched the other buyers moving around them.
“He’s working his way into the seller’s good graces, isn’t he?” Yudai said, more statement than ques
tion. “If we have to do this each time, it’s going to take forever to try and get through all the stands.”
But Tatsu barely registered Yudai speaking, for his skin was prickling with a too-familiar feeling of foreboding. He whipped his head to the side as he turned, but he couldn’t see anything. There were too many people and too much noise bombarding his senses from all directions. He tried to close his eyes and reach out with his instincts with no result; there was simply too much activity to pick anything out, and the failure caused his stomach to cramp.
“Tatsu!” Yudai repeated until Tatsu finally broke his stare at the crowd.
“Sorry.”
Yudai frowned. “You’re all jumpy and nervous again.”
“Someone is watching us,” Tatsu said, “and I don’t like it.”
The defensive sensation passed as the dread faded out of his blood, but he couldn’t get his heart to calm down. Whatever was toeing the edges of his faculties, it felt like the stalking of a cliffcat, perched high above him and out of sight, just waiting for the moment to pounce. Lurking in the shadows and tiring out its victim worked well for predators on the mountainsides, and the same thing in Moswar’s crowds was a death sentence for them.
“Did you see anyone?” Yudai asked.
Tatsu shook his head. “No. It’s just a feeling. But someone’s there.”
“That’s not really very helpful,” Yudai said, but he did seem a little less confident. He took a few seconds to steal glances at the market goers around them. After checking the crowd for a time, Yudai put his hands to his head and ran his fingers through his hair. The roots, finally longer than his pinky finger, looked less uniform and more mottled. The top of his head might as well have had ink spilled over the crown, the black liquid dripping down the bleached strands in uneven droplets.
“This is silly,” he said with a sigh. “If we can’t see anyone following us, and we can’t prove that anyone is there, what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who could even know we were here?” Yudai asked. “We just got here, and we haven’t announced our presence.”
Still, Tatsu’s chest wouldn’t unclench, and the constrictive tightness of his arm sling wasn’t helping matters. “Ral and Alesh were able to find us.”
“That’s different,” Yudai said, scoffing. “Ral’s special. I doubt anyone else has a tracker with her uncanny abilities leading them.”
Jotin, at the alchemist’s wares stand, appeared to be reaching the end of his conversation with the seller. He had nothing in his hands, and the tone of his voice was resigned, even if Tatsu didn’t know what was being said. He pushed himself up and away from the table full of bottles, shaking his head.
“Nothing,” he said. “She refused to engage me with anything unlicensed.”
“So now what?” Yudai asked.
“We try again with the next one, and we pray we have better luck there.”
But the next one dragged out for even longer with the same results. Tatsu couldn’t help at all when Jotin launched into his conversations with the sellers, and there was even less he could do when Jotin kept returning with nothing. Tatsu watched people walk away from other tents with small baubles, satchels of dried herbs, and totems carved from animal bones, but it seemed none of the alchemists they tried were willing to talk about their black market poisons.
Stopping at one stall after another, they made their way on a zig-zagged curve through the Raydrau, until the sun was peeking up over the horizon and Tatsu’s eyelids were threatening to sink closed. There were no more strange instances of being watched, but there also was no information to get them any closer to stopping Yudai’s uncontrollable siphon.
The morning’s arrival stung. Tatsu was exhausted from keeping such a focused guard all night, and Yudai was cranky from defeat.
“So that’s it?” Yudai asked as the last stand they visited began packing up the glass bottles to store during the day. “We have no options?”
“We did not talk to everyone,” Jotin said. “There is still a chance that someone here will know something.”
“Yeah, but not even one person agreed to show you their poisons.”
Jotin’s expression looked haggard; he’d done all of the talking all night, and no doubt his throat was pounding out the repercussions of it.
“Sometimes, approaching the merchant several times shows your resolve and determination,” he said. “It is possible that repeated visits will convince the alchemists we are serious about our questions.”
“Then we need to come back again,” Tatsu said.
Yudai hissed out his frustration. “This system is useless. How did these poisons ever make their way to Runon if this is the process to get them?”
Tatsu’s stomach twisted. He tried not to think of Alesh and her jobs back in Chayd, but the thoughts came unbidden anyway.
“Smugglers,” he said. “We’re approaching the source rather than the network. All of these alchemists already have people they trust running their products out, and we aren’t part of them.”
Jotin nodded, and Tatsu didn’t feel particularly happy to have been right.
“The alchemists in the market have little to gain by talking to us,” he agreed, “and everything to lose. We are not trusted or known here; why would they want to help us?”
Through a break in the thinning crowd, Tatsu saw Alesh and Ral walking towards them. Ral was holding a small beaded trinket, but Alesh’s hands were empty, and any hope Tatsu had of success disappeared with the stars overhead.
“Sorry,” Alesh said, crossing her arms over her chest. “People here really didn’t want to talk to me. Not even my old connections helped. I’m doubtful that many of them even had what I was asking for.”
As Ral played with her prize, beads strung on several thick leather cords, Yudai shrank inwards on himself. In light of their dismal night of work, his face lost its edge—instead of the haughty chin tilt that was always more endearing than snobbish, he looked lost and alone. His heavily curved shoulders made him appear so much smaller than he usually did, and curled up on himself, he didn’t look much like a prince at all.
The sight of him sent a shock of something unsettling through Tatsu’s core.
“Hey,” he said and found himself reaching for Yudai’s arm without really thinking about it. “We’ll find something, I promise. We’ll sort this out.”
“Let’s just go back to the sayen.” Yudai wouldn’t meet Tatsu’s eyes. “We’ve got to move our hammocks to make sure I don’t kill more trees.”
Despite his prodding, Tatsu was unable to get Yudai to talk to him any more as they returned to the sayen under the pinking dawn sky. They walked in silence, shoulders heavy with the crushing weight of disappointment.
After a restless day of sleep, they went back to the Raydrau to try again. The second night was just as bustling as the first night had been, except somehow, the magic from the multi-colored rings of light that spread across the ground seemed dimmer. The hanging lanterns and the shadowy tents held less promise and fewer rewards, and the optimism that Tatsu had first felt was leaking out of his blood. He tried to engage Yudai but got few real responses. It was like the hope was gone, burned out of him with the soaring heat of the desert sun.
“It’s only been one night,” Tatsu tried again as they gathered near the edge of the night market where the buildings gave way to the flat, sand-packed square. “We’ll find something to help tonight.”
“If this doesn’t work, what do we do?” Yudai asked. “Move around every day so I can’t drain an entire city? Hide away from the world forever?”
“We’ll… we’ll figure something out,” Tatsu said. “We’ll find the smugglers who move the toxins across Rad-em and into Chayd. We’ll sail across the Oldal Sea to find a new antidote entirely. There’s always something else we can do.”
But his heart wasn’t completely in the words, and it was obvious Yudai knew it too. Tatsu knew how useless
he was with only one arm. His dead limb was strapped close to his chest in a linen sling. He didn’t have the knowledge of the desert fauna or the art of alchemy to do anything himself and returning across the mountains promised only more of the same pain they’d already escaped from. Tatsu tried to come up with another possibility, but all of it got stuck in his throat. His whole body reverberated with the pounding of his heart, hammering the same message out with each shuddering beat: This was the last option to save Yudai.
Jotin, for his part, didn’t appear downtrodden.
“We can hit several stands again to prove our resolve,” he said, “and I can go to more that Alesh visited yesterday. I may have better luck as someone from within the dominions.”
He turned to wade his way into the crowd. Tatsu’s blood ran cold and he called out: “Wait. We should stay together.”
Jotin raised both eyebrows. “That will halve our ability to reach all the alchemists.”
“Stay together,” Tatsu insisted, running his tongue over his dry lips as he rubbed at the hair standing up on his arms. “And keep your eyes open.”
The feeling of being watched continued as they moved together to the first stand. Tatsu watched Ral delightedly trace her fingers over the colored glass bottles holding a variety of tonics. He shifted so that the bulk of his attention was spread out behind them, longing for his woods where he knew the risks. The creeping feeling had always faded within minutes before, but rather than disappear, it seemed to intensify. It tasted bitter in the back of his throat, and for a moment, his mind flashed back to when his father had first fallen ill over ten years ago. There was something dark in the lurking danger, something that Tatsu didn’t think he would be able to fight—it was the sinking, aching feeling of inescapable inevitability.
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